SOME QUESTIONS OF THE MOMENT
Sovereign States and the Federal Government--California and
the Senate--The Constitutional Powers of Congress and the
President--Government by Interpretation--President Roosevelt
as an Inspiration to the People--A New Conception of the
Presidential Office--"Teddy" and the "'fraid strap"--Mr.
Roosevelt and the Corporations--As a Politician--His
Imperiousness--The Negro Problem--The Americanism of the
South.
It was said that it would be necessary to refer again to the subject of
the relations of the General Government to the several States, as
illustrated by the New Orleans incident and the treatment of the
Japanese on the Pacific Coast; and the first thing to be said is that no
well-wisher of the United States living in Europe can help deploring the
fact that the General Government has not the power to compel all parties
to the Union to observe the treaties to which the faith of the nation as
a whole has been pledged. It is a matter on which the apologist for the
United States abroad has, when challenged, no defence. Few people in
other countries do not consider the present situation unworthy of the
United States; and I believe that a large majority of the American
people--certainly a majority of the people east of the Rocky
Mountains--is of the same opinion.
It is no excuse to urge that when another Power enters into treaty
relations with the United States it does so with its eyes open and with
a knowledge of the peculiarities of the American Constitution. This is
an argument which belongs to the backwoods stage of American
statesmanship. In the past, it is true, the United States has been in a
measure the spoilt child among the nations and has been permitted to sit
somewhat loosely to the observance of those formalities which other
Powers have recognised as binding on themselves; but the time has gone
by when the United States can claim, or ought to be willing to accept,
any especial indulgences. It cannot at once assert its right to rank as
one of the Great Powers and affect to enter into treaties on equal terms
with other nations, and at the same time admit that it is unable to
honour its signature to those treaties.
This, I say, is the general opinion of thinking men in other countries;
but, however desirable it may be that the General Government should have
the power to compel the individual States to comply with the
requirements of the national undertakings, it is difficult, so long as
the several States continue jealous of their sovereignty without regard
to the national honour, to see how the end is to be arrived at.
The first obvious fact is that all treaties are made by the President
"by and with the advice and consent of the Senate" and no treaty is
valid until ratified by a vote of the Senate in which "two thirds of the
Senators present concur." The Senate occupies a peculiar position in the
scheme of government. It does not represent either the nation as a whole
nor, like the House of Representatives, the people as a whole. The
Senate represents the individual States each acting in its sovereign
capacity[287:1]; and the voice of the Senate is the voice of those
States as separate entities. When the Senate passes upon any question it
has been passed upon by each several State and it is not easy to see how
any particular State can claim to be exempt from the responsibility of
any vote of the Senate as a whole.
It would appear to follow of necessity that when the Senate has by a
formal two-thirds vote ratified a treaty, every State is bound to accept
all the obligations of that treaty, not merely as part of the nation but
as a separate unit. The provision in the Constitution which makes the
vote of the Senate on any treaty necessary can have no other intent than
to bind the several States themselves. As a matter of historical
accuracy it had no other intent when it was framed.
In the particular case of the Japanese treaty, the time for the State of
California to have made its attitude known was surely when the treaty
passed the Senate. The California Senators, or the people of the State,
had then two honest courses open to them. They could have let it be
known unequivocally that they did not propose to hold themselves bound
by the action of the Senate but would, if any attempt were made to force
them to comply with the terms of the treaty, secede from the Union; or
they could have determined there and then to abide loyally by the terms
of the treaty and no matter at what cost to the State, or at what
sacrifice of their _amour propre_, to see that all the rights provided
in the treaty were accorded to Japanese within the State. Either of
these courses would have been honest; and Japanese who came to
California would have come with their eyes open. The course which was
followed, of allowing them to settle in the State in the expectation of
receiving that treatment to which the faith of the United States was
pledged, and then denying them that treatment, was distinctly dishonest.
If, however, the State of California, or any other individual State,
refuses to acknowledge the responsibilities which it has assumed by the
vote of the Chamber of which its representatives are members, there
appears no way in which the Federal Government can compel such
acknowledgment except those of force and what the believers in the
extreme doctrine of State Sovereignty consider Constitutional
Usurpation.
It has in many cases been necessary as the conditions of the country
have changed so to interpret the phrases of the Constitution as to give
to the General Government powers which cannot have been contemplated by
the framers of that instrument. In this case there is every evidence,
however, that the framers did intend that the General Government should
have precisely those powers which it now desires--or that the individual
States should be subject to precisely those responsibilities which they
now seek to evade--and if any sentence in the Constitution can be so
interpreted as to give to the General Government the power to compel
States to respect the treaties made by the nation, it seems unnecessary
to shrink from putting such interpretation upon it.
Under the Constitution, Congress has the power to "regulate commerce
with foreign nations"--and commerce is a term which has many
meanings--as well as "to define and punish offences against the law of
nations" and to "make all laws which shall be necessary for carrying
into execution the foregoing powers." The President is invested with the
power, "by and with the advice of the Senate, to make treaties," and he
is charged with the duty of taking "care that the laws be faithfully
executed." It would seem that among these provisions there is specific
authority enough to cover the case, if the will to use that authority be
there. And I believe that in a large majority of the people the will is
there.
It would appear to be competent for Congress to "define" any failure on
the part of the citizens of any State to comply with whatever
requirements in the treatment of foreigners may be imposed on them by a
treaty into which the nation has entered, as an "offence against the law
of nations." This power of "definition" on the part of Congress is quite
unhampered. So also is the power "to make all laws which shall be
necessary and proper for carrying into execution" the powers of
definition and punishment. And it would be the duty of the President and
the Federal Courts to take care that the laws were executed.
If there would be any "usurpation" involved in such an interpretation of
the phrases of the Constitution it is certainly less--much less, when
regard is had to the intention of the framers of the Constitution--than
other "usurpations" which have been effected, and sometimes without
protest from the individual States; as, for instance, by the expansion
of the right to regulate commerce between the several States into an
authority to deal with all manner of details of the control of railways
of which the framers of the Constitution never contemplated the
existence. It cannot even remotely be compared with such an extension of
the Federal power as would be involved in the translation of the
authority to "establish post-offices and post-roads" as empowering the
government to take an even larger measure of control over those
railroads than can be compassed under the right to regulate commerce--a
translation which seems to have the approval of President Roosevelt.
Incidentally it may be remarked that it would be peculiarly interesting
if, at this day, that authority to construct post-roads should thus be
invoked to give the General Government new powers of wide scope, when we
remember that it was this same provision of the Constitution which stood
sponsor for the very earliest steps which, in the construction of the
Cumberland Road and other military or post routes, the young republic
took in the path of practical federalism.
To those Americans who received the cause of State Sovereignty as a
trust from their fathers and grandfathers before them, the cause
doubtless appears a noble one; but to the outsider, unbiassed by such
inherited sentiment, it seems evident, first, that the cause, however
noble, is also hopeless; and, second, that it is unreasonable that in
the forlorn effort to preserve one particular shred of a fabric already
so tattered, the United States as a nation should be exposed to frequent
dangers of friction with other Powers, and, what is more serious, should
be made, once in every decade or so, to stand before the world in the
position of a trader who repudiates his obligations.
And if I seem to speak on what is after all a domestic subject with
undue vehemence (as I cannot hope that I shall not seem to do to the
minds of residents on the Pacific Coast), it is only because it is
impossible for an earnest well-wisher of the United States living abroad
not to feel acutely (while it does not seem to me that Americans at home
are sensible) how much the country suffers in the estimate of other
peoples by its present anomalous position. When two business concerns in
the United States enter into any agreement, each assumes the other to be
able to control its own agents and representatives, nor will it accept a
plea of inability to control them as excuse for breach of contract.
It may be that a select circle of the statesmen and foreign office
officials in other countries are familiar with the intricacies of the
American Constitution, but the masses of the people cannot be expected
so to be, any more than the masses of the American people are adepts in
the constitutions of those other countries. And it is, unfortunately,
the masses which form and give expression to public opinion. In these
days it is not by the diplomacies of ambassadors or the courtesies of
monarchs that friendships and enmities are created between nations. The
feelings of one people towards another are shaped in curious and
intangible ways by phrases, sentiments, ideas--often trivial in
themselves--which pass current in the press or travel from mouth to
mouth. It is a pity that the United States should in this particular
expose itself to the contempt of lesser peoples, giving them excuse for
speaking lightly of it as of a nation which does not keep faith. It does
not conduce to increase the illuminating power of the example of America
for the enlightenment of the world.
It might be well also if Americans would ask themselves what they would
do if a number of American citizens were subjected to outrage (whether
they were murdered as in New Orleans, or merely forced to submit to
indignities and inconvenience as in California) in some South American
republic, which put forward the plea that under its constitution it was
unable to control the people or coerce the administration of the
particular province in which the offences were committed. Would the
United States accept the plea? Or if the outrages were perpetrated in
one of the self-governing colonies of Great Britain and the British
Government repudiated liability in the matter? The United States, if I
understand the people at all, would not hesitate to have recourse to
force to endeavour to compel Great Britain to acknowledge her
responsibility.
In the matter of the relation of the general government to the several
States the most important factor to be considered at the present moment
is undoubtedly the personality of President Roosevelt, and any attempt
to make intelligible the change which has come over the United States of
recent years would be futile without some recognition of the part which
he has played therein. Mr. Roosevelt has been credited with being the
author of "a revival of the sense of civic virtue" in the American
people. Certainly he has been, by his example, a powerful agent in
directing into channels of reform the exuberant energy and enthusiasm
which have inspired the people since the great increase in material
prosperity and the physical unification of the country bred in it its
quickened sense of national life. In the period of activity and
expansiveness--one is almost tempted to say explosiveness--which
followed the Cuban war, such a man was needed to guide at least a part
of the national energy into paths of wholesome self-criticism and
reformation. He set before the youth of the country ideals of patriotism
and of civic rectitude which were none the less inspiring because easily
intelligible and even commonplace.[293:1] The ideals have, it is true,
since then, perhaps inevitably and surely not by his will, been dragged
about in the none too clean mud of party politics; but the impetus which
he gave, before his single voice became largely drowned in the factional
hubbub around him, endures and will endure. Whatever comes, the American
people is a different people and a better people for his preaching and
example.
Moreover, what touches the question of State sovereignty nearly, he has
given a new character to the Presidential office. I have expressed
elsewhere my belief that the process of the federalising of the country,
the concentration of power in the central government, must proceed
further than it has yet gone; but it is difficult now to measure, what
history will see clearly enough, how much Mr. Roosevelt has contributed
to the hastening of the process. No President, one is tempted to say
since Washington, but certainly since Lincoln, has had anything like
the same conception of the Presidential functions as Mr. Roosevelt,
coupled with the courage to insist upon the acceptance of that
conception by the country. Whether for good or ill the office of
President must always stand for more, reckoned as a force in the
national concerns, than it did before it was occupied by Mr. Roosevelt.
A weak President may fail to hold anything like Mr. Roosevelt's
authority; but the office must for a long time at least be more
authoritative, and I think more honourable, for the work which he has
done in it.
* * * * *
I first came in contact with Mr. Roosevelt some twenty-five years ago,
when his personality already pervaded the country from the Bad Lands of
Dakota to the Rocky Mountains. I had a great desire to meet this person
about whom, not only in his early life but, as it were, in his very
presence, myth was already clustering,--a desire which was almost
immediately gratified by chance,--but the particular detail about him
which at the time made most impression on my mind was that he was the
reputed inventor of the "'fraid strap." The "'fraid strap" is--or was--a
short thong, perhaps two feet in length, fastened to the front of the
clumsy saddle, which, at signs of contumacy in one's pony, one could,
with a couple of hitches, wrap round his hand, in such a way as to
increase immensely the chance of a continuity of connection with his
seat. The pony of the Plains in those days was not as a rule a gentle
beast, and I was moved to gratitude to the inventor of the "'fraid
strap"--though whether it was really Mr. Roosevelt's idea or not it is
(without confession from himself) impossible to guess, for, as I have
said, he was already, though present almost a half-mythical person to
the men of the north-western prairie country.
What vexed me no little at the time was that it was with some effort
that I could get his name right. I could not remember whether it was
Teddy Roosevelt or Roosy Teddevelt. The name now is familiar to all the
world; but then it struck strangely on untrained English ears and to me
it seemed quite as reasonable whichever way one twisted it round. Mr.
Jacob Riis (or Mr. Leupp) has protested against the President of the
United States being called "Teddy" and we have his word for it that Mr.
Roosevelt's own intimates have never thought of addressing him otherwise
than as "Theodore." Doubtless this is correct (certainly I know men who
assure me that they call him "Theodore" now) but at least the more
friendly "Teddy" has, as is proved by that confusion in my mind of a
quarter of a century ago, the justification of long prescription. Nor am
I sure that it has not been a fortunate thing both for Mr. Roosevelt and
the country that his name has been Teddy to the multitude. I doubt if
the men of the West, the rough-riders and the plainsmen, would give so
much of their hearts to Theodore.
It is not easy to estimate the value, or otherwise, of Mr. Roosevelt's
work in that capacity in which he has of late come to be best known to
the world, namely as an opponent of the Trusts; but it is a pity that so
many English newspapers habitually represent him as an enemy of all
concentrated wealth. He has been called "the first Aristocrat to be
elected President." Whether that be strictly true or not, he belongs
distinctly to the aristocratic class and his sympathies are naturally
with that class. His instincts are not destructive. No one, I have
reason to believe, has a shrewder estimate of the worthlessness of the
majority of those politicians who use his name as a cloak for their
attacks on all accumulated wealth than he. It is only necessary to read
his speeches to see how constantly he has insisted that it is not
wealth, but the abuse of it, which he antagonises: "We draw the line not
against wealth, but against misconduct." He has many times protested
against the "outcry against men of wealth," for most of which he has
declared "there is but the scantiest justification." Again and again he
has proclaimed his desire not to hurt the honest corporation, "but we
need not be over-tender about sparing the dishonest."[296:1]
One of the chief difficulties in the practical application of his
policies has been that the Government cannot have the power to punish
dishonest corporations without first being entrusted with a measure of
control over all corporate operations, the concession of which control
the honest corporations have felt compelled to resist. Nor is it
possible to say that their resistance has not been justified. However
wisely and forbearingly Mr. Roosevelt himself might use whatever power
was placed in his hands, there has been little in the experience of the
corporations in America to make them believe that they can trust either
office-holders in general or, for any long term, the Government itself.
Dispassionate students of the railway problem in the United States are
aware that there is nothing which the corporations have done to the
injury of the public worse than the wanton and gratuitous injuries which
have been done by the politicians, by the State governments, and even on
occasions by the Federal Government itself, to the corporations. If
particular railway companies have at times abused the power of which
they were possessed as monopolising the transportation to and from a
certain section of the country, that abuse has not excelled in
wantonness and immorality the abuses of their power over the
corporations of which several of the Western States have been
systematically guilty. There has been little encouragement to the
corporations to submit themselves to any larger measure of public
control than has been necessary; and the lessons of the past have shown
that it would be injudicious for the railways to surrender
uncomplainingly to the State governments authority which the British
companies can leave to the Board of Trade without misgiving. And there
was a time when the national Interstate Commerce Commission was, if more
honest, not much less prejudiced in its dealing with the corporations
subject to its authority than were the governments or railway
commissions of the individual States.
Mr. Roosevelt's desire may have been (as it is) only to protect the
people against the misuse of their power by dishonest corporations; and
the honest corporations would be no less glad than Mr. Roosevelt himself
to see the dishonest brought to book. But in the necessity of resisting
(or what has seemed to the corporations the necessity of resisting) the
extensions of the federal power which were requisite before reform could
be achieved, the honest have been compelled to make common cause with
the dishonest, so that the President has, in particular details, been
forced into an attitude of hostility towards all corporations (and the
corporations have for the most part been forced to put themselves in an
attitude of antagonism to him) in spite of their natural sympathies and
common interests.
The result has been unfortunate for business interests generally because
the mere fact that the President was "against the companies" (no matter
on what grounds, or whether he was against them all or only against
some) has encouraged throughout the country the anti-corporation feeling
which needed no encouragement. Any time these forty years, or since the
early days of the Granger agitation, the shortest road to notoriety and
political advancement (at least in any of the Western States) has been
by abuse of the railroad companies. A thousand politicians and
newspapers all over the country are eager to seize on any phrase or
pronouncement of the President which can be interpreted as giving
countenance to the particular anti-railroad campaign at the moment in
progress in their own locality. A vast number of people are interested
in distorting, or in interpreting partially, whatever is said at the
White House, so that any phrase, regardless of its context,--each
individual act, without reference to its conditions,--which could be
represented as an encouragement to the anti-capitalist crusade has been
seized upon and made the most of. All over the West there have always,
in this generation, been a sufficient number of persons only too
anxious, for selfish reasons, to inflame hostility against the railroad
companies or against men of wealth; but only within the last few years
has it been possible for the most unscrupulous demagogue to find colour
and justification for whatever he has chosen to preach in the example
and precept of the President--and of a President whose example and
precept have counted for more with the masses of the people than have
those of any occupant of the White House since the war. In this way Mr.
Roosevelt has done more harm than could have been accomplished by a much
worse man.
If the corporations have suffered, the course of events has been
unfortunate too for Mr. Roosevelt. No one is better aware than he of the
misrepresentation to which he is subjected and the unscrupulous use
which is made of his example; and it is impossible that at times it can
fail to be very bitter. It must also be bitter to find arrayed against
him many men whose friendship he must value and whose co-operation in
his work it must seem to him that he ought to have. It happens that his
is not a character which is swayed by such considerations one hair's
breadth from the course which he has marked out for himself; but it is
deplorable that a very large proportion of precisely that class of men
in which Mr. Roosevelt ought (or at least is justified in thinking that
he ought) to find his strongest allies have felt themselves compelled to
become his most determined opponents, while those interests which ought
(or at least are justified in thinking that they ought) to to find in
Mr. Roosevelt, as the occupant of the White House, their strongest
bulwark against an unreasoning popular hostility only see that that
hostility is immensely inflamed and strengthened by his course and
example. The conditions are injurious to the business interests of the
country and weaken Mr. Roosevelt's influence for good.
Yet it seems impossible--or certainly impossible for one on the
outside--to place the responsibility anywhere except on those general
conditions of the country which make possible both the misrepresentation
of the position of the President and the wide-spread hostility to the
corporations, or on those laxities in political and commercial morality
in the past which have put it in the power alternately of the politician
to plunder the railways and the railways to prey upon the people. In the
ill-regulated conditions of the days of ferment there grew up abuses,
both in politics and in commerce, which can only be rooted out with much
wrenching of old ties and tearing of the roots of things; but it is
worth an Englishman's understanding that the fact that this wrenching
and this tearing are now in progress is only an evidence of that effort
at self-improvement, an effort determined and conscious, which, as we
have already seen more than once, the American people is making.
Whatever certain sections of the American press, certain politicians, or
certain financial interests, may desire the world to think, there is no
need for those at a distance to see in the present conflict evidence
either of a wicked and radically destructive disposition in the
President or of an approaching disintegration of the American commercial
fabric.
Meanwhile, as has been said, one result has been to weaken Mr.
Roosevelt's personal influence for good. I have been assured by men of
undoubted truthfulness, who are at the head of large financial
interests, that he has, in the last few years, become as tricky and
unscrupulous in his political methods as the oldest political
campaigner; a statement which I believe to be entirely mistaken.
"Practical politics," said Mr. Roosevelt once, "is not dirty politics.
On the contrary in the long run the politics of fraud and treachery is
unpractical politics, and the most practical of all politicians is the
one who is clean and decent and upright." There is no evidence which I
have been able to find that Mr. Roosevelt does not now believe this as
thoroughly and act upon it as consistently as when he first entered the
New York State Legislature.
A more reasonable accusation against him, which is made by many of his
best friends, is that his imperious will and his confidence in his own
opinions make him at times unjust and intolerant in his judgment of
others. There have been occasions when he has seemed over-ready to
accuse others of bad faith without other ground than his own opinion or
the recollection of what has occurred at an interview. He may have been
right; but it is certain that he has alienated the friendship of not a
few good men by the vehemence and positiveness with which he has
asserted his views. And anything, independent of all questions of party,
which weakens his influence is, for the country's sake, a thing to be
deplored.
* * * * *
The negro question has contributed not a little to Mr. Roosevelt's
difficulties, as it has to the misunderstanding of the American people
in England. I know intelligent Englishmen who have visited the United
States and honestly believe that in the not very distant future the
country will again be torn with civil war, a war of black against white,
which will imperil the permanence of the Republic no less seriously than
did the former struggle. I do not think that the apprehension is shared
by many intelligent Americans.
It is perhaps inevitable that Americans should frequently be irritated
by the tone of the comments in English papers on the lynchings of
negroes which occur in the South. Some of these incidents are barbarous
and disgraceful beyond any possibility of palliation, but it is certain
that if Englishmen understood the conditions in the South better they
would also understand that in some cases it is extremely difficult to
blame the lynchers. Many of those people who in London (or in Boston)
are loudest in condemnation of outrages upon the negro would if they
lived in certain sections of the South not only sympathise with but
participate in the unlawful proceedings.
It has already been mentioned that among the men in New Orleans who
assisted at the summary execution of the Italian Mafiotes there were, it
is believed, an ex-Governor of the State and a Judge: men, that is to
say, as civilised and of as humane sentiments as the members of any club
in Pall Mall. They were not bloodthirsty ruffians, but gentlemen who did
what they did from a stern sense of necessity. It has been my lot to
live for a while in a community in which the maintenance of law and
order depended entirely on a self-constituted Vigilance Committee; and
the operations of that committee were not only salutary but necessary.
It has also been my lot to live in a community where the upholders of
law and order were not strong enough to organise a Vigilance Committee.
I have been one of three or four who behind closed doors earnestly
canvassed the possibilities of forming such an organisation, and neither
I nor any of the others (among whom I remember were included one
attorney-at-law and one mining engineer and surveyor) would have
hesitated to serve on such a committee could it have been made of
sufficient strength to achieve any useful purpose, but the disparity
between our numbers and those of the "bad men" who at that time
controlled the community was too obvious to give us any hope of being
able to enforce our authority. There may, therefore, be conditions of
society infinitely worse than those where order is preserved by lynch
law; and I make no doubt that neither I myself nor any fellow-member of
my London Club would, if living in one of the bad black districts of the
South, act otherwise than do the Southern whites who live there now.
What is deplorable is not the spirit which prompts the acts of summary
justice (I am speaking only of one class of Southern "outrage") but the
conditions which make the perpetration of those acts the only
practicable way of rendering life livable for white people; and for the
responsibility for these conditions we must go back either to the
institution of slavery itself (for which it should be remembered that
England was to blame) or to the follies and passions of half a century
ago which gave the negro the suffrage and put him on a plane of
political equality with his late masters.[303:1] If, since then, the
problem has grown more, rather than less, difficult, it has not been so
much by the fault of the Southern white, living under conditions in
which only one line of conduct has been open to him, as of Northern
philanthropists and negro sympathisers who have helped to keep alive in
the breasts of the coloured population ideas and ambitions which can
never be realised.
The people of the North have of late years come to understand the South
better, and whereas what I have said above would, twenty years ago, have
found few sympathisers in any Northern city, I believe that to-day it
expresses the opinion of the large majority of Northern men. I also
believe that the necessary majority could be secured to repeal so much
of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution as would
be necessary to undo the mistake which has been committed. It is true
that in some Southern States the majority of the blacks are practically
disfranchised now; but it would remove a constant cause of friction and
of political chicanery if the fact were recognised frankly that it is
not possible to contemplate the possibility of the negro ever becoming
the politically dominant race in any community where white people live.
There is no reason to believe that the two races cannot live together
comfortably even though the blacks be in a large majority, but there
must be no question of white control of the local government and of the
machinery of justice.
Taking away the franchise from the negro would not, of course, put an
end to many of the social difficulties of the situation, but, the
present false relations between the two being abolished, those
difficulties are no more than have to be dealt with in every community.
There would be a chance for the negroes as a race to develop into useful
members of the community, _as negroes_, filling the stations of negroes
and doing negroes' work, along such lines as those on which Mr. Booker
Washington is working. The English have had a wide experience of native
races in all parts of the world and they have not yet found the problem
of living with them and of holding at least their respect, together with
some measure of their active good-will, anywhere insoluble. To an
Englishman it does not seem that it should be insoluble in the United
States. He is rather inclined to think that the rapidity with which the
negro of the South would work out his economic salvation, if once the
political difficulty were removed, would depend chiefly on the ability
of the race to produce a continuity of men like Mr. Booker Washington,
with, perhaps, the concurrent ability of the north to produce men (shall
I say, like the late W. H. Baldwin?) to co-operate with the leaders and
teachers of the blacks and to interpret them and their work to the
country.
The Englishman in England is chiefly impressed by the stories of
Southern outrages upon the blacks and he gets therefrom an erroneous
idea of the character of the Southern white. An Englishman who studies
the situation on the spot is likely to acquire great sympathy with the
Southern white and to condemn only the political ineptitude which has
made the existing conditions possible.
Whether Mr. Roosevelt's course has been the one best adapted to
facilitate a solution of the difficulties it would be idle to enquire.
The laws being as they are, and he being the kind of man he is and, as
President, entrusted with the duty of seeing that the laws are
faithfully executed, he could not have taken a different line. Another
man (and an equally good man) might have refrained from making one or
two of his appointments and from entertaining Mr. Washington at the
White House. But if Mr. Roosevelt did not do precisely those things, he
would not do fifty other of the things which have most endeared him to
the people.
* * * * *
In this connection, it may be that there will be readers who will think
that in many things which I say, when generalising about the American
people as a whole, I fail to take into proper account the South and
characteristics of such of the people of the South as are distinctively
Southern. It is not from any lack of acquaintance with the South; still
less from any lack of admiration of or affection for it. But what has
been said of New York may in a way be said of the South, for whatever
therein is typically Southern to-day is not typically American; and all
that is typically Southern is moreover rapidly disappearing. In the
tremendous activity of the new national life which has been infused into
the country as a result of its solidification and knitting together of
the last thirty years, there is no longer room for sectional divergences
of character. They are overwhelmed, absorbed, obliterated; and the
really vital parts of the South are no longer Southern but American.
What has the spirit of Atlanta in Georgia, of Birmingham in Alabama, of
any town in the South-west, from St. Louis to Galveston, to do with the
typical spirit of the South? However strong Southern _sentiment_ may
still be, what is there of the Southern _spirit_ even in Richmond or in
Louisville? I need hardly say that America produces no finer men than
the best Virginian or the best Kentuckian, but, with all his Southern
love and his hot rhetoric, the man of this generation who is a leader
among his fellows in Kentucky or in Virginia is so by virtue of the
American spirit that is in him and not by virtue of any of the dying
spirit of the old South.
FOOTNOTES:
[287:1] Mr. Bryce felicitously speaks of the Senate as "a sort of
Congress of Ambassadors from the respective States" (_The American
Commonwealth_, vol. 1, page 110).
[293:1] "He stands for the commonplace virtues; he is great along lines
on which each one of us can be great if he wills and dares" (_Theodore
Roosevelt, the Man and Citizen_, by Jacob A. Riis). Mr. Roosevelt has
spoken of himself as "a very ordinary man." A pleasant story is told by
Mr. Riis of the lady who said: "I have always wanted to make Roosevelt
out a hero, but somehow, every time he did something that seemed really
great, it turned out, upon looking at it closely, that it was only just
the right thing to do."
[296:1] See his _Addresses and Presidential Messages_, with an
introduction by Henry Cabot Lodge (Putnams, 1904).
[303:1] To those who would understand the negro question and the
mistakes of the people of the North during the Reconstruction period (to
which the present generation owes the legacy of the problem in its acute
form) I commend the reading of Mr. James Ford Rhodes's _History of the
United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Restoration of Home
Rule in the South in 1877_ (Macmillan).